Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age

2. States of Eugenics: Institutions and Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California

2 States of Eugenics: Institutions and Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California Alex Wellerstein Between 1909 and the early 1950s, the state of California sterilized over twenty thousand patients in government institutions for the mentally ill and mentally deficient. Of the many states that had compulsory sterilization programs, California’s was by far the largest in terms of patients sterilized, affecting nearly as many people as the sum of the totals from the next four top-sterilizing states combined (figure 2.1).1 The motivation for these sterilizations has traditionally been associated with the concept of eugenics: the desire to improve the human gene pool by discouraging the reproduction of the “unfit.” These mass sterilizations have generally been taken as the most tangible and permanent of all of the American forays into eugenics, and its closest link to the genocidal policies practiced by National Socialist Germany. The history of eugenics is generally told explicitly as “a history of a bad idea” (e.g., Carlson 2001). It is an intellectual history, an account of the dangerous power of ideology-infected science. This framework, which dominated historical accounts of eugenics since they first started being written in the 1960s, tended to focus on the genesis and transformation of eugenic thought as reflected in the writings of eugenic propagandists and occasionally state legislation.2 Aside from legislation for immigration restriction, eugenics had very little federal recognition in the United States, and was prosecuted mainly on a state-by-state basis. In the American case, the intellectual history approach has been used extensively to trace strong connections between the American embrace of eugenics and the case of the Nazis (Black 2003). Such comparisons pack considerable rhetorical impact in a culture that has long prided itself on its crusading role in the Second World War, and the history of eugenics and possible eugenic futures have become the standard case study of the intersection between biology and society. 30 Chapter 2 But does this top-down, idea-centric view actually illuminate the American case? I argue in this chapter that California’s history of sterilization shows that it does not. A history of ideology neither explains why California ’s sterilization rates were so much higher than the rest of the country nor gives an account of why they dropped off dramatically in the early 1950s. Although it was the most influential of the state sterilization stories —the Nazis famously pointed to California’s success when embarking on their own mass sterilization program (Kühl 1994, 39–44)—California’s sterilization program has generally been lumped in with the overall story of American eugenics in a way that neither recognizes nor explains its particularities.3 In this chapter, I look closely at the institutional, organizational basis of sterilization in California, tracing how the power to sterilize—and the questions of who to sterilize, why, and perhaps why not—wended their way through legal, medical, and local frameworks. 6,297 7,162 20,108 3,786 2,424 1,049 3,284 3,032 2,350 2,341 1,910 1,823 945 902 789 772 685 683 679 557 556 326 277 256 253 224 42 38 30 98 California Virginia North Carolina Michigan Georgia Kansas Indiana Minnesota Oregon Iowa Wisconsin North Dakota Delaware Nebraska South Dakota Utah Washington Mississippi New Hampshire Connecticut Oklahoma Maine South Carolina Montana Vermont Alabama West Virginia NewYork Idaho Arizona Figure 2.1 Cumulative sterilizations by state, 1907–1964, out of 63,643 total. These statistics are misleadingly precise (many sterilizations no doubt went unreported), but the order of magnitude is probably correct. Source: Robitscher 1973, appendix 2; graph by author. States of Eugenics 31 Because of the particulars of the California case, power ended up being disproportionately concentrated in the hands of individual hospital administrators , who were often intellectually and physically quite distant from the direct influence of eugenics. This institutional view of eugenics paints a more subtle picture of the ways in which ideology undergoes translation and transformation as it becomes practice. The particular model for that process here is one that may call for a more general reevaluation of our overall understanding of eugenics in the American context.4 This historical chapter contributes on several levels to a broader work on our contemporary bioconstitutional moment. First, the history of eugenics has been the primary lens through which questions of biological power have...